LOSING TARA
LOSING TARA
Leslie Gerber
Sample Poem
What We Want
What I want
is for her to rise and walk,
to say my name,
to say her name.
What she wants
is another spoonful of fruit.
What I want
is to sit by the fire
on a cold Cape Cod night
wind yelling outside
and talk about the movie we just saw,
how the kids are doing,
what’s in today’s paper.
What she wants
is to get her face away from my kiss,
although she might like the next one.
I want
to take her away from this place
where smiling women in purple shirts
are patiently teaching her
to walk again.
She wants them
to leave her alone.
I do not know
what I want anymore.
So much is gone
that I don’t know what
to miss first
She misses things too
but not knowing what they are
seems to make it easier.
12/24/14
Synopsis
“The poems in this collection began with a few tributes to love, and then chronicle our experiences together over our last decade. For this reason, I have kept them in the order in which I wrote them, with only an exception or two. (Dates are of first drafts.) At the end I have added a few short poems by Tara, dictated to a computer program and to me when she couldn’t write by herself. I have not altered them in any way except by adding punctuation.”
—Leslie Gerber
About Tara
Tara McCarthy was born in Manhattan in 1933. The family moved to Scarsdale when she was five. After high school she attended Catholic University in Washington, later earning master's degrees in education at Columbia University and in African Studies at SUNY New Paltz. An early marriage brought her to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where she taught third grade for three years. After she returned east, she worked as a writer and editor at My Weekly Reader and wrote a book called Room 10 based on her classroom experiences. It was published under her original name of Agnes McCarthy and became a minor children's classic, remaining in print for more than 25 years.
After writing a few more trade books, Tara began a long career as a writer of educational materials, textbooks and teacher guides, including many books for Scholastic. In 1985, she became the companion of Leslie Gerber. The couple married in 2011. Her son Daniel lives in Sarasota. She died in October of 2018.
Tara was known to her friends and colleagues as a regal beauty (she was 6'2" tall) of rare intelligence, great kindness, and a quick and wicked sense of humor. She was one of a kind.
Select Reviews
“The spouses and loved ones of patients with dementia experience a devastating emotional burden as they watch them decline. Leslie Gerber has taken the unusual and compelling step of publishing the poems he
wrote in honor of his wife during her tragic course. This is an eloquent way to memorialize their times together and also her most human qualities, which dementia progressively destroys.”
““Thank you for your efforts to put into words what many people feel. Beautiful and evocative work.””
“Losing Tara is a lovely, many-hued tribute. I thought when I heard you read some of these poems that ‘tenderness’ was their tuning fork, and lo! There’s a poem so entitled. It is a note you strike throughout, along
with those of understanding and love. Bravo! You have filled to the brim for Tara ‘a glass of great wine.’”
“I think it’s a misstep to congratulate someone for writing a book with so much trouble and pain in it, but I just wanted to let you know that I have...been moved and shaken by its dark beauty.
”